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Are We Optimizing Ourselves Into Burnout? The Anxiety Of Wellness

Author: Ava Durgin

May 08, 2026

Assistant Health Editor

By Ava Durgin

Assistant Health Editor

Ava Durgin is the former Assistant Health Editor at mindbodygreen. She holds a B.A. in Global Health and Psychology from Duke University.

Image by Aditi Shah x mbg creative

May 08, 2026

At some point, wellness stopped feeling like support and started feeling like something to keep up with. Maybe it shows up as subtle guilt when you skip a workout, or the instinct to check your sleep score before you even ask yourself how you feel.

I found myself coming back to that tension, so I put the question to Aditi Shah, a mindfulness and meditation instructor. What she said shifted the way I was thinking about all of this. Not because she dismissed wellness, but because she asked a more uncomfortable question. Who, exactly, is all of this for?

As she put it, a wellness routine stops being supportive “the moment your life starts serving it instead of the other way around.”

> A wellness routine tips into stress the moment your life starts serving it instead of the other wayaround.

When wellness becomes something you have to perform

There’s a version of wellness that feels grounding. It’s the walk that clears your head, the workout that leaves you with more energy, the habits that support your day. And then there’s another version that looks almost identical from the outside but feels completely different internally.

It’s the one where skipping a workout ruins your mood. Where a streak matters more than how your body actually feels. Where rest itself comes with rules. The practice itself isn't the problem, Shah pointed out; it's what the practice has come to mean. The behavior hasn’t changed, but your relationship to it has.

That’s where wellness starts to blur into identity. It’s no longer just something you do; it becomes something you prove. And once that happens, it becomes surprisingly easy for comparison to creep in.

Wellness, as Shah put it, is “fertile ground for comparison precisely because it disguises itself as the opposite.” Wellness is sold as the most personal thing you can do for yourself. And yet it has become one of the most public. Other people's morning routines, sleep scores, biological ages, and 4:30 a.m. wake times are everywhere. And the moment any of those things becomes measurable, it becomes rankable. And once it’s ranked, it’s almost impossible not to compare.

RELATED READ: Are We Trading Connection For Control In The Name of Health?

The pressure to be “well” is creating a new kind of anxiety

Many of us have come to this world of wellness to feel better. You start because you’re anxious. You build a routine to feel better. But then the routine itself becomes another source of anxiety.

Am I doing enough? Am I doing it right? Why does it seem easier for everyone else?

And now that you’ve stepped into the identity of someone who is “working on themselves,” there’s another layer. You’re aware of your anxiety, tracking it, trying to regulate it. Sometimes even anxious about being anxious.

Part of the issue, she explained, is how high the bar has been set. Being “well” no longer means not being sick. It means optimized. Sleeping like an athlete, regulating like a monk, performing like a founder. It’s a standard that sounds aspirational but is almost impossible to sustain.

> The irony of wellness culture is that it can, for some, create a perpetual anxiety loop.

Mental fitness has become a status symbol

There’s another shift happening that Shah pointed out, and once she said it, it felt obvious. Mental fitness is becoming its own kind of flex. You see it in the way we talk. Therapy language has moved into everyday conversation. Boundaries, attachment styles, nervous system regulation, “doing the work.” All of it is valuable, but it’s also increasingly visible, shared, and sometimes performed.

There’s a version of inner work that happens privately, and then there’s the version that gets curated and displayed.

For Shah, mental fitness isn’t about how it looks from the outside. It’s about capacity. The ability to stay steady under pressure, to recover from setbacks, to sit with discomfort. It’s being able to stay in a relationship with yourself even when things aren’t going well.

"We all need an inner reservoir of strength and resilience," she said, "so that we can bend without breaking, pick ourselves up when we stumble, and begin again." That's harder to post about than a morning routine. It's also harder to fake.

> We all need an inner reservoir of strength and resilience, so that we can bend without breaking, pick ourselves up when we stumble, and begin again.

The burnout blind spot in high performers

One of the most interesting parts of our conversation was how this all connects to burnout, especially for people who are deeply invested in wellness. You’d assume that people who ar